I have had lengthy chats with gamer-friends about this. As a pretty serious gamer myself the decision cannot be taken lightly! However I will only be able to choose 1 console to buy this year… so do I upgrade my PS3, or my Xbox 360?
Obviously the Xbox has already been released, and there has been a lot of hype over the voice commands and the central platform for all your TV-connected requirements, however we will start from the ground up.
Looks
Xbox One
I was a fan of the Xbox 360 design. It looks great, albeit a bit chunkier than the PS3. The Xbox One, however, has a complete redesign and in my opinion it looks a bit shitty. The box is bulkier, plain, and lacks imagination. Sure it will look fairly sophisticated under your TV as your primary media centre, but where is the fun in sophistication! I will say, the Xbox logo looks pretty cool lit up, but other than that I am less than impressed by the overall look of the device.
PlayStation 4
Sony have kept the deisgn a secret, only allowing you to see tiny zoomed in flashes of the device during a video currently available on the PlayStation official page. From what I can see, the PS4 and the Xbox One will look pretty similar, both going for the standard black. However from what I can see, Sony have designed a case with a much more “Stealth Bomber” inspired look with sharp angles and beautiful curves. Even the air-ventilation looks cool with what I can only describe (and imagine from the tiny image) as chevron colouring in white. We will have to wait with held breath as they unveil it at E3.
Specs
The specs of the systems are pretty similar, but the PS4 has better graphics processing and faster memory:
| Microsoft Xbox One vs. Sony PlayStation 4 Spec comparison | ||||||||||||||
| Xbox 360 | Xbox One | PlayStation 4 | ||||||||||||
| CPU Cores/Threads | 3/6 | 8/8 | 8/8 | |||||||||||
| CPU Frequency | 3.2GHz | 1.6GHz (est) | 1.6GHz (est) | |||||||||||
| CPU µArch | IBM PowerPC | AMD Jaguar | AMD Jaguar | |||||||||||
| Shared L2 Cache | 1MB | 2 x 2MB | 2 x 2MB | |||||||||||
| GPU Cores | 768 | 1152 | ||||||||||||
| Peak Shader Throughput | 0.24 TFLOPS | 1.23 TFLOPS | 1.84 TFLOPS | |||||||||||
| Embedded Memory | 10MB eDRAM | 32MB eSRAM | - | |||||||||||
| Embedded Memory Bandwidth | 32GB/s | 102GB/s | - | |||||||||||
| System Memory | 512MB 1400MHz GDDR3 | 8GB 2133MHz DDR3 | 8GB 5500MHz GDDR5 | |||||||||||
| System Memory Bus | 128-bits | 256-bits | 256-bits | |||||||||||
| System Memory Bandwidth | 22.4 GB/s | 68.3 GB/s | 176.0 GB/s | |||||||||||
The PlayStation just about clinches it for me in the hardware specs.
Extra Features
The exstra features can make and break consoles. Obviously we have heard a lot regarding the Xbox One features which basically allows your Xbox to be your central device for gaming, TV, movies, music and pictures. This is a nice selection, but I already have a Pi and media server to provide that for me which automatically downloads what I tell it to, so I don’t need any of that.
Voice recognition on the Xbox sounds pretty cool, but I don’t buy into it. I don’t want to talk to a device to get it working, believe it or not I would rather have a physical means of doing so such as a remote control. So these features mean nothing to me.
The PlayStation still remains elusive as to all of the features as it is not to be released for a little while, but controller features have been unveiled. A cool new coloured bar allows you to see what player you are playing as, and as you move around the room with friends playing in split-screen mode, the order of screens on the board with move to match the position you are playing at in relation with your friends… cool eh? But not ground breaking.
I guess before I make a decision I need to wait until June 10th to find out the full potential of the PS4, but so far, my money is going Sony’s way and I am looking into purchasing a shiny new PS4.